


Sweet Dreams

by dining_alone



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Dream Sharing, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force Ghosts, Post-TLJ, and luke skywalker cockblocks his nephew from beyond the grave, in which kylo ren is a creep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-04
Updated: 2018-06-01
Packaged: 2019-03-13 08:27:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13566702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dining_alone/pseuds/dining_alone
Summary: Kylo finally figures out how to get through to Rey.





	1. Chapter 1

 

Rey couldn’t shut him out while she slept.

He discovered it without meaning to one night, when he fell into one of her dreams: a nightmare about a sandstorm on Jakku. Kylo watched her—younger than she was when they met in the forest, barely even an adolescent—take stock of her dwindling water stores as the sand streaked and whirled outside her hideout, accumulating around the viewports and throwing the cramped little space into total darkness. Then one of the viewports shattered, hurling shards of transparisteel at her, and the wind and sand came howling inside.

She was trapped. She was finished. She would be buried alive, and her family would never be able to find her body underneath the mass of shifting dunes. _If they ever came looking for her at all._

Rey let out a high, desperate noise, somewhere between a scream and a sob.

That was when Kylo woke, sitting bolt upright in his narrow bed aboard the Finalizer. For a few moments he struggled to tamp down on the claustrophobic horror that the dream had induced. Pushing away the sweat-soaked bedding, he rose and began to pace his chambers, his mind reeling from residual panic, and then—a dawning realization.

Their bond had not died with Snoke; that much was obvious. He still sensed her there with him, a warm and increasingly familiar pressure at the back of his mind, but the channel of communication between them had been cut off since that day on Crait, when the girl looked him in the eye and closed the door in his face. He had tried to reach out to her several times in the intervening cycles—not knowing what he would say, but needing to see her again, wanting to hear her voice. It never worked; Rey must have done something to prevent their connection from flaring to life, probably employing the same technique she had used to guard her mind on Starkiller.

But whatever she was doing, she clearly couldn’t keep it up while she was unconscious. The Force had found a way to bring them together, and Kylo intended to make full use of it. In the dark of his quarters, he allowed himself a small smile.

 

***

 

Re-entering her dreams was more difficult than he anticipated.

At first, he operated under the assumption that Rey had some semblance of a coherent sleep schedule. Once every sixteen hours or so, he would extract himself from the latest bureaucratic inanity that Hux had foisted upon him and escape to his chambers, where he prodded at their mental connection, testing its give. More often than not, he ran right up against the hard barrier of her conscious mind. But on a few occasions, he managed to slip through.

The first time it happened, he wasn’t careful enough. He was so relieved to find her guard down that he pushed into her dreams with the level of force he usually reserved for interrogations, realizing too late that such a graceless intrusion would wake her up.

He was right. Her consciousness abruptly coalesced and sharpened around him, and seconds later he was thrown from her mind. The door between them slammed shut once more.

After that, he made a point to enter a meditative state before reaching out to her. It wasn’t easy; as Skywalker had delighted in reminding him, meditation was not Kylo’s strong suit. Sometimes he managed to reach the same empty-minded tranquility through repetitive tasks like brushwork or cycling through lightsaber forms, but just _sitting_ there, quiet and still, was an invitation for all sorts of cruel thoughts to fill the void—little resentments, jealousies, and annoyances gathering in his head like storm clouds until he leapt to his feet and stalked out of the exercise room, feeling his fellow apprentices’ eyes on him all the while.

Snoke never asked him to meditate. It was one of the few small mercies his former master had offered. But perhaps if he had, Kylo would not struggle to clear his mind, to shut out the push-pull of his emotions and just _breathe_.

Searching for something calming, he remembered the holodisc his mother used to play for him when he had trouble sleeping as a child.

_At night, desperate to sleep—_

The disc would fill his little bedroom with the sounds of gentle thunder and waves rolling against a distant shoreline: a storm moving out to sea.

_– you imagine an ocean._

They were the same noises he heard the second time he connected with Rey, when she called him a monster. He imagined her the way she must have looked that day on the island, before the Force bridged their minds. He pictured her reaching out to cup the rain in her hands, closing her eyes and smiling. He wondered if it was the first time she had ever seen a thunderstorm.

With that image of her glowing in his mind’s eye, Kylo fell easily into the meditative state that had so often eluded him under Skywalker’s tutelage. There, in the deep dark space between sleep and waking, he found Rey’s unconscious mind waiting for him. Slipping into her dreams required no effort at all.

He arrived in the same nightmare: the one about the sandstorm, where child-Rey huddled against the wall of her little hideout with her forehead pressed to her knees, overcome by dread and despair.

But she didn’t have to suffer this way anymore, not while Kylo was here. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the storm outside, visualizing swirling grains of sand crystallizing into fat raindrops. The howl of the wind deepened and softened into gentle thunder. The clouds of dust rose higher in the sky and became clouds of moisture.

Kylo opened his eyes—he didn’t remember closing them—and found child-Rey staring at him in wonder. Wordlessly, he stretched out his hand to her. She got to her feet and took it, allowing him to lead her outside, into the desert thunderstorm.

The expression on the girl’s face shifted from awe to delight. She broke from him and let out a loud whoop, spinning and laughing in the downpour, opening her mouth to catch the raindrops on her tongue.

A part of him wanted to keep her like that, dancing in the rain, brimming with an uncomplicated joy that Kylo barely remembered from his own childhood. But that wasn’t why he was here.

“Rey,” he called out, “Come here.”

The girl was at his side in an instant, gazing up at him curiously.

“Who are you?” she asked.

He sank down into a crouch, so their faces were level. “You’ll find out someday.”

This time he offered her both hands, and Rey—so trusting, despite everything she had been through—grasped them in her much smaller ones. Kylo rose to his feet, pulling her through space and time, up from her dream and into the memory of the last time he saw her in the flesh.

She was the young woman he remembered now. They stood on opposite sides of the throne room, sparks and bits of burning debris drifting down from the ceiling. Snoke and the Praetorian Guard lay dead at their feet.

For a moment they just stared at one another. It occurred to Kylo that he never actually planned out what he was going to say to her if he got this far. Even bringing her into this memory had been an impulsive decision.

Rey opened her mouth to speak, and Kylo realized that if he let her get the words out, nothing would change; she would bring up her friends in the Resistance, he would make another fruitless plea for her to join him, and then she would escape and shut him out again.

No, he wasn’t going to let that happen this time. Instead, he stalked across the room and did what he should have done all those months ago: he drew Rey into his arms and kissed her.

Somewhat unexpectedly, she kissed him back. Kylo wasn’t controlling her; he might be able to control their surroundings, but he couldn’t make _her_ do anything. Which must mean she wanted this. She wanted _him._ Maybe not consciously, but some part of her did, and Kylo reveled in that knowledge.

Rey kissed him fiercely and inexpertly, scraping her teeth over his bottom lip, and Kylo wondered if he was the first person she had ever done this with. The thought came with a dark, possessive thrill. He slid his hands down her hips to grip the curve of her ass and then lifted her up off the ground, allowing her to wrap her legs around his waist. She responded by burying her fingers in his hair and sliding her tongue into his mouth.

Kylo was hard now, so hard, and he rubbed his clothed erection against her, seeking whatever friction he could find. Then he broke from the kiss and pressed his lips to her collarbone, inhaling her scent. She smelled so _real_ , even in the dream: like rain and sea air with an intoxicating undercurrent of blood and sweat. Rey’s grip in his hair tightened, and she began to rock against him in time with his own movements.

In truth, Kylo had been fantasizing about something like this for months now. The thoughts often came to him during the ship’s night cycles, when he confined himself to his chambers and tried in vain to rest. Alone in his narrow bed, he imagined what it would feel like to have her lying beneath him, naked and wanting. Or straddling his hips, one hand pressed against his chest to hold him still while she sank down on his cock.

Had Rey indulged in similar fantasies? Did she lie awake in her tiny little bunk on the Falcon, touching herself and thinking of him? Or had he awoken something in her that she didn’t know was there? Both possibilities exhilarated him. His kisses turned into gentle bites, worrying away at the tender skin between her neck and shoulder. He knew that whatever marks he left on her were unlikely to persist beyond the dream, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. Right now, he needed to show her that she was his.

Rey groaned and squirmed in his arms. “Ben, _please…_ ” she breathed.

That was when a horrible, familiar voice interrupted them.

“Congratulations, Ben. It looks like you finally figured out how to meditate.”

The dream evaporated, and suddenly Kylo was back in his quarters, sitting cross-legged on his bed, Rey’s warmth nothing but a distant memory. His eyes snapped open.

Luke Skywalker lounged in the chair opposite him.

Two competing impulses seized Kylo at once: the first was to grab his lightsaber from the nightstand and run Skywalker through, and the second was to cover his erection with a pillow. Given what had happened the last time Kylo tried to strike his uncle down, he chose the second option.

“You’re dead,” he snarled with as much dignity as he could muster, once the pillow was in place. “I felt you die.”

Skywalker, watching him with evident amusement, replied, “ _There is no death, there is the Force._ You should remember that from your training.”

Still reeling, Kylo scrutinized him more closely. In his initial shock, he had failed to register both the eerie blue glow surrounding his uncle and the faint translucency of his form.

He thought back to one of the first stories Skywalker told him about the rebellion, just a few weeks after his mother and father sent him away. His uncle explained that Kylo’s namesake, Ben Kenobi, had passed into the Living Force when he died so he could continue to aid Skywalker in his quest against the Empire. _For a true Jedi_ , Skywalker said, _death doesn’t have to be the end._

When Kylo repeated Skywalker’s claim to his next master, Snoke scoffed. _The Jedi have always used the fear of death to manipulate their charges,_ he warned. _Do not allow yourself to be swayed._

It took years for Kylo to fully grasp the irony of those words. Snoke had told him countless lies; this was just another deception among many.

A jolt of panic accompanied the thought. If Skywalker was powerful enough to live on in the Force after death, then surely the same was true of his second master. Was Snoke still out there somewhere, biding his time, planning Kylo’s ultimate defeat and humiliation? Part of him wanted to ask his uncle, but he didn’t trust Skywalker to give him a straight answer—or any answer for that matter. Instead he blurted out a different question.

“Why did you come here?”

Skywalker shrugged, spreading his arms wide in what was obviously meant to be a conciliatory gesture. “Just to give you a little friendly advice.”

Somehow after all these years, his uncle still knew exactly what to say to set him off. “ _Friendly advice_?" Kylo repeated. His voice dripped with ire. “The last time we saw each other, I tried to kill you. The time before that, you tried to kill _me_!”

Skywalker frowned. Suddenly he looked solemn and immensely tired. If it was a bluff, it was a good one. “I never wanted to kill you,” he said quietly.

The image of a glowing green blade held aloft in a darkened room flashed before Kylo’s eyes. He let out a sharp, humorless laugh. “Liar.”

“I know there’s nothing I can say now that will make you believe me. But I still want to help you, Ben.”

It was too much. Kylo leapt to his feet. “I don’t need your _help_ ,” he spat. “I am Supreme Leader of the First Order. The whole galaxy fears me. And I’m more powerful than you ever were. What could you possibly help me with?”

“Rey,” his uncle said simply.

Kylo felt as though he had been doused in icy water. “I don’t care about the scavenger,” he replied after a short pause, doing his best to keep his voice toneless and level.

“Now who’s the liar?”

“I already told you. She means nothing to me. If she stands against me, I’ll destroy her.” He knew the words sounded unconvincing even as he spoke them. The tremor in his voice didn’t help.

His uncle raised an eyebrow. “Then why waste all that time and energy trying to get inside her head?”

How did Skywalker know about that? Had he been there, in Rey’s dream, spying on them? The idea filled Kylo with horror, but he’d be damned if he let his uncle see it. “The girl is strong in the Force. If I turned her, she could become a valuable ally.”

“It looks like you’re interested in a little more than an alliance.” Skywalker glanced down pointedly at the pillow lying on the floor.

Kylo’s face burned. Of course his uncle had come here to mock him, to revel in his humiliation. He should have expected nothing less. “Get out,” he hissed.

Skywalker rose from the chair, ignoring the demand. He had to look up to meet Kylo’s gaze, and a tiny part of Kylo was grateful for the reminder that he towered over his uncle.

“How long do you think it will take Rey to figure out what you’re doing? How long before she turns the tables and uses the same technique against you?”

Kylo shook his head. “I won’t let that happen.”

“Won’t you? You don’t exactly have the best track record there.”

“I told you to _get out_!” Kylo seethed.

“What you don’t understand,” Skywalker continued, as though his nephew hadn’t spoken at all, “is that you and Rey aren’t the same. You think you found someone just as lonely as you, just as desperate for connection. But you’re wrong. Rey already found her belonging with the Resistance. She has people who care about her. And you? You just have people who _fear_ you. How does that feel?”

The lightsaber was in Kylo’s hand before he could think. It crackled to life in an instant, and he swung it at Skywalker with the full force of his rage. But the blade passed right through his uncle, exactly as it had on Crait. It connected with the durasteel-paneled wall behind him instead, sending up a shower of sparks.

Kylo let out a cry of frustration. Skywalker fixed him with a look that was maddeningly like pity.

“Sweet dreams, Ben,” he said, and then vanished from the room.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm czerka-shill on tumblr now. Feel free to drop me a line here or in the comments!


	2. Chapter 2

 

The sudden change in the Supreme Leader’s behavior did not go unnoticed by the Finalizer staff.

Kylo Ren’s attendance at military and administrative briefings was always spotty at best, but in recent months he hadn’t deigned to be present for a single one, not even by holo. Nor did he make any extended appearances on the bridge; every now and then he would sweep in and tersely order the navigators to set course for some obscure star system before disappearing again for days. The destinations he chose didn’t hold any apparent strategic value, but the crew quickly learned not to question him. The one officer who had was still recovering in the medical bay.

Another change on the ship involved semi-frequent visits by the Knights of Ren, although there never seemed to be more than two of them aboard at a given time. Most of the crew hadn’t seen the Knights before, and a large subset doubted their existence entirely – until they caught sight of the masked, black-armored figures stalking the Finalizer’s corridors. The technicians working the graveyard shift in the hangar claimed that the Knights would follow Kylo Ren onto his shuttle, escorting him down to whichever backwater world they were orbiting.

The crew gave the Knights a wide berth. The new Supreme Leader, with his glowering demeanor and inclination toward bouts of destructive rage, was at least a known quantity. The same could not be said of the Knights; they came and went silently, never speaking to anyone other than Kylo Ren, and never removing their masks.

Various rumors about their identity circulated throughout the ship. Some thought they were elite assassins, cast off from the disbanded bounty hunters’ guild. Others theorized that they were fallen Jedi, former students of Luke Skywalker who had been seduced to the Dark Side. One particularly jumpy lieutenant claimed that underneath the masks and armor were unspeakable xenomorphic horrors from the Unknown Regions. The other officers scoffed at this, but they avoided looking directly at the Knights all the same.

The only person who seemed pleased with these developments was General Hux. Although he rarely attended briefings in person – one of Kylo Ren’s first acts as Supreme Leader was to strip him of command of the Finalizer and transfer him to a different ship – his self-satisfied smirk when he looked around the conference table and noted the Supreme Leader’s absence was obvious, even by holo. With Kylo Ren distracted, the General grew bolder, giving orders that Ren almost certainly would have repudiated, had he been present.

None of the other officers questioned Hux’s commands, and no one alerted the Supreme Leader to the liberties the General was taking. They were too wary to approach him, too frightened of what he might do to the person who interrupted whatever mysterious endeavor had consumed him.

 

***

 

Kylo Ren stood facing the sea, watching the waves crash against the rocky outcrops below. Somewhere in the distance, one of the island’s native creatures squawked plaintively.

“Master,” rasped a voice behind him.

Kylo did not turn. He had sensed the Knight’s approach long before he heard her speak. “Report.”

“We interrogated the Lanai. There has been no trace of Skywalker since the great tree burned.”

He expected as much, but he couldn’t stop his hands from balling into fists at his sides. “Can we be sure they’re telling the truth?” he grit out.

“They are weak-willed. It was not difficult to lay their minds bare.”

“And what about the girl?”

If the Knight noticed the shift in Kylo’s tone, she did not comment on it. “They have not seen her since she left in Solo’s ship. They were not sad to see her go. She—” The Knight hesitated. “Her power frightened them.”

Kylo felt a strange rush of pride. He suddenly remembered how Rey had looked that day on Starkiller, when he stared up at her from the snowy forest floor. She had been incandescent with rage, and he felt the Force surge within her, dark and resonant.

_She is its instrument_ , he remembered thinking wildly, _and I’m just a practitioner._

The realization should have angered him – or at the very least, caused him some alarm. But it only made him want to see her again, to reach out across the light years that separated them and feel her skin against his.

“Master?” the Knight prompted, shaking Kylo out of his reverie.

“Tell the captain to prepare for departure,” he replied. “We’ve learned all we can from this place.”

But they hadn’t learned much of anything useful. A cursory investigation revealed that Skywalker had been living on the island for some time – years, according to the natives. They found a few of his personal effects in stone huts clustered atop a ridge: dishes, clothing – and a familiar pair of golden dice on a thin chain. Kylo’s first impulse upon seeing the dice was to destroy them: to throw them into the sea or crush them beneath his boots. But he slipped them into his pocket instead. He told himself that they might yet provide some clue as to Skywalker’s power.

The Knights located Skywalker’s old X-Wing submerged in the shallows off the western coast. With difficulty, Kylo raised it out of the water and brought it ashore. The way it looked drifting toward them reminded Kylo of his fifteenth birthday, when his uncle came to collect him on Chandrila. He bit down viciously on his lip, drawing blood, hoping that pain would drive the memory away.

It didn’t, of course. When he verified that the ship held nothing of interest, he wiped his mouth and ordered his Knights to cast it back into the sea.

After that, they scaled the stone steps that led away from the western beach. When they came to a junction, Kylo took the left-hand path while the Knights took the right. Up and up he climbed, until he arrived at what looked like the mouth of a large cave. Stepping inside, he found himself in an airy, cavernous structure. Light from the planet’s twin suns filtered in from an opening opposite him, illuminating a shallow pool in the center of the room. At the bottom of the pool, underneath the thin sheen of water, lay a symbol that Kylo recognized from early in his training: the insignia of the Prime Jedi.

So Skywalker had achieved his goal, then. He had found the first Jedi temple. Kylo always imagined that such a place would be imbued with the light side of the Force, but gazing down into the pool, he felt nothing out of the ordinary. No powerful light, no powerful darkness – only the low thrum of the Living Force, which was present on all inhabited planets.

Kylo suppressed the impulse to drive his lightsaber into the heart of the pool. This was his uncle’s work, he was certain of it. Skywalker had done something to rob this place of its power, to prevent anyone else from learning its secrets.

Fighting a rising tide of frustration and disappointment, he turned on his heel and left the temple. He found the Knights waiting for him halfway down the steps, where they informed him that they had discovered something. They led him down the right-hand path until the husk of a great, burned tree appeared atop the crest of a hill.

“A Uneti tree,” Kylo murmured, running his fingers over the blackened bark. He knew of their existence, but he had never seen one in person. He came away with ashes on the fingertips of his gloves.

The trees were sacred to the Jedi. His uncle would not have destroyed this one lightly.

He turned to the Knights. “Did you search the interior?”

They nodded. “There was nothing but ash, Master,” one of them supplied.

Kylo wanted to scream. With difficulty, he mastered the impulse. He would not let the Knights see him break. “Round up the natives for questioning,” he ordered. “Don’t harm them unless it proves necessary.”

He set off on his own, after that. The island was not large; in spite of the rough terrain, it only took him a few hours to make a complete circuit around its shoreline. All the while, he stretched out his senses with the Force, searching for one last thing: the cave that Rey had described to him. From the way she spoke about it, he expected to feel its pull the moment he set foot on the island, as he had with the tombs on Moraband and the Sith shrine underneath the old Imperial Palace on Coruscant. He couldn’t predict what the cave would show him – he didn’t anticipate finding endless reflections of himself, like Rey did – but a place so ancient, so steeped in the dark side would surely hold _something_ for him. If nothing else, the darkness there would energize him, ground him, and set him on the path to victory.

But Kylo felt nothing. He found only ordinary sea caves, carved into cliffsides by eons of rushing waves. There was no trace of the black, sucking hole that Rey claimed had swallowed her.

This, too, had to be Skywalker’s doing. _But how?_ The question consumed Kylo’s thoughts as the shuttle broke through the planet’s atmosphere, speeding back to the Finalizer. How had his uncle purged the island of both the light and the dark? How had he continued to live on in the Force after death?

_Skywalker’s powers are far beyond your own,_ he thought. The words sounded unnervingly like something Snoke would say when Kylo disappointed him, before the inevitable punishment began.

He flinched at the thought. _Snoke is dead,_ he reminded himself. But was he truly gone, or was he only dead in the same way Skywalker was dead? Neither of his former masters needed a physical body to torment him; Skywalker had proven that much.

Still, months had passed since his uncle appeared in his chambers – months that Kylo spent scouring the galaxy for any information as to how he managed such a feat. This island planet was the last of many stops on what was shaping up to be a fruitless journey.

Alone in the shuttle’s private compartment, Kylo buried his face in his hands. His thoughts turned, as they often did, to Rey.

She hadn’t opened her mind to him since that night, and Kylo made no attempt to slip into her dreams. She’d certainly appeared in _his_ dreams since then, but it wasn’t really her – just a lewd facsimile conjured up by hormones and frustration. He always woke up hard afterward, rutting against the mattress like a teenager, until he took himself in hand, thinking about how she had wrapped her legs around his waist and kissed him fervently and inexpertly, like she wanted him just as much as he wanted her.

He wondered if Rey had similar dreams. He wondered if she woke up wet for him and hated herself for it. The only thing stopping him from finding out was the fear that Skywalker could be there in his mind, silently observing whatever transpired between them.

Kylo shook his head, willing the thought away. No, he knew Skywalker’s signature in the Force. If his uncle tried to gain access to his mind, he’d feel it. Wouldn’t he?

Months ago, Kylo would have said yes. Now he was no longer certain.

Perhaps all he needed was more practice. He stood up and flicked his index finger. The door next to him opened with a hiss, and Kylo strode into the adjoining compartment.

The Knights leapt to their feet immediately when they saw him, then bowed their heads in unison. Kylo turned to the male Knight. “Meet me in the starboard training room at the beginning of third cycle.”

He nodded. “Shall I bring—”

“No need for any special equipment,” Kylo interrupted. “And come alone.”

He returned to the private compartment and remained there for the duration of the trip back to the Finalizer, steeling himself for what was to come. If all went well, he promised himself, he would see Rey again tonight.

 

***

 

“Would you like me to try again, Master?” the Knight asked, not quite hiding the weariness in his voice.

They were both seated on the padded floor of the Finalizer’s largest training room, and Kylo sensed the exhaustion coming off the man in dull waves. He was sure that if he asked him to remove his helmet, he would find the pale face underneath shining with sweat.

Kylo was beginning to tire as well, although he didn’t show it. The Knight had been battering away at his mind for hours, testing the strength of his mental shields. It wasn’t easy to keep him out; he was decidedly the strongest of the Knights in this particular arena, which was why Kylo had chosen him. But his abilities, while impressive, did not match those of either of Kylo’s former masters.

“No,” said Kylo, waving a dismissive hand. “That’s enough. Leave me.”

The Knight stood, inclined his head, and silently exited the room. When the doors closed behind him, Kylo collapsed to the floor. He gazed up at the high, durasteel-paneled ceiling, thoughts racing.

He had succeeding in protecting his mind from the Knight’s probing. His mental defenses were as strong as they had ever been. But were they strong enough to keep Skywalker out?

He closed his eyes, and the image of Rey appeared in the darkness. The urge to see her again felt almost like a physical ache, tugging at him. In the last few months, scarcely a day had gone by that he hadn’t thought of her.

In spite of himself, he also kept dwelling on something Skywalker had said: _Rey already found her belonging with the Resistance. She has people who care about her._

His uncle undoubtedly said it to hurt and demoralize him, but it wasn’t a lie. The traitor, Dameron, his mother – they had all managed to sink their claws into Rey and sway her to their cause. If Kylo had been the one to find her, if _he_ had been the one to rescue her from her isolation on that blasted wasteland of a planet, then things might be different. Rey could be at his side this very moment – or waiting for him in his chambers, eager for his return.

Skywalker be damned. Kylo was going to try again. And this time he was going to show Rey what her world would look like if he had saved her from Jakku before her loneliness had time to fester. He would show her a world where she never went to bed hungry, where there were no electrical burns or sandstorms or disgusting junk bosses leering at her more intently with each passing year. She would find the belonging she sought in him, and he in her. Snoke, Skywalker, the Resistance – none of them would have the strength to stand in their way.

But first, he had to reach out to her again.

Instead of picturing Rey, Kylo concentrated on how it felt to hold her, to have her legs wrapped around him and her fingers wound in his hair. She had been so warm, so solid then – it was hard to believe it all happened in a dream.

Focusing on those sensations, he reached out through the Force, half-expecting to run up against her mental fortifications as he had so many times before. But to his surprise, her mind opened for him the second his consciousness brushed up against it, like a night-blooming flower whose petals unfurled at the first touch of moonlight.

He didn’t fall into her subconscious this time; instead something _pulled_ him. When the dream resolved around him, he realized with a sickening jolt that he was in the main hold of his father’s old ship, seated on a bench across from the Dejarik table. The sight of the black-and-white checkered surface brought back a flood of memories, none of which Kylo wanted to revisit. He quickly looked away.

That was when he noticed Rey, standing in the entrance to the port-side corridor. She regarded him with a flinty look in her eyes, her mouth set in a hard line. Then she turned and disappeared down the curved hallway.

“Rey,” Kylo called after her.

She didn’t come back. Kylo frowned. He didn’t like that she was dreaming about the Falcon. The fact that she was probably cruising around the galaxy in this heap of junk was bad enough. He didn’t want it infecting her subconscious as well. But it was no matter. He had reshaped her dreams once before, and now he would do it again. He shut his eyes and concentrated, envisioning the ship melting away around them, freeing them both from its confines.

It didn’t work. The fabric of the dream warped and buckled at first, but soon Kylo found that the harder he pushed, the stronger the dream held. Something – _someone_ – was stopping him from bending it to his will.

He should have known this would happen. “Skywalker,” he hissed, speaking his uncle’s name like a curse.

“No.”

It was Rey’s voice. Kylo’s head snapped up, and his eyes flew open, but she was nowhere to be found. Instead, someone else stood in the doorway opposite him.

Leia Organa. His mother.

She looked older than he remembered. Her hair was more gray than brown now, and there were fresh lines across her forehead and around her mouth. Her eyes held a sadness that Kylo had never seen there before, but when her gaze landed on him, she broke into a watery smile.

“Ben,” she said, in that low, raspy voice of hers. “You came back.”

Kylo wanted to shake his head. He wanted to leap to his feet and flee the room. He wanted to open his eyes and wake up in the training chamber on the Finalizer. But his legs would not obey him, and the dream persisted no matter how hard he tried to will it away. He could only watch his mother approach, helpless and immobile.

Leia smoothed her skirts underneath her and sat next to him on the bench. Kylo tried not to look in her direction. _It’s not her,_ he told himself. If his mother were truly there with him in the dream, he would have sensed her Force signature well before she appeared. But her face, her voice, even the way she _smelled_ – it all felt so real.

Leia reached out, gently cupping his cheek and turning his head toward her. The gesture was wrenchingly familiar, and Kylo had to swallow down a sudden lump in his throat.

Her eyes bored into his. “I never gave up on you, Ben. Not once.” she said softly, stroking his cheek.

_Liar,_ he wanted to say. She had given up on him the moment she shunted him off onto Skywalker.

As though she knew what Kylo was thinking, his mother said, “Everything that happened to you – it was my fault. I never should have sent you away, not when you needed me the most.” Her voice broke. She sounded like she was on the verge of tears. “I’ll never be able to forgive myself for that.”

He couldn’t look at her anymore. Kylo turned away, feeling traitorous pinpricks of moisture gathering at the corners of his eyes. _It’s just a dream,_ he reminded himself.

“But I can forgive _you,_ Ben,” Leia continued. “And if your father were here, I know he’d do the same.”

Kylo finally mustered the strength to respond. “I don’t want your forgiveness,” he said, voice still thick from the lump in his throat.

Leia nodded. “I know. But you have it.” Then, without warning, she pulled him into a tight embrace.

He had been taller than his mother since he was eleven years old, and by the time she sent him off to train with Skywalker, he towered over her by almost a foot. But now, in the warmth of her arms, Kylo felt like a small child again. This was how she used to hold him when they lived on Chandrila, when he would wake from a nightmare and call out in the darkness for his mother. She would smooth his hair away from his face, smile down at him, and tell him that it was all just a bad dream, that he had nothing to fear.

To his horror, a choked sob escaped his lips. Leia shushed him, pulling him closer and stroking the back of his head. He couldn’t help but melt against her. For a brief moment, his mind went blissfully quiet.

The spell broke when Kylo looked over his mother’s shoulder and saw Rey there, watching them from across the room. Her expression was inscrutable, but he sensed a whirlwind of conflicting emotions pouring off her: jealousy, anger, pity, sorrow, determination…

Kylo opened his mouth to call out to her, but before he could find the words, the dream was ripped away from him. He woke in the training chamber on the Finalizer and found himself staring up at his uncle’s glowing, translucent form.

Everything clicked into place. Of course it had been Skywalker all along. It was just like his uncle to use the memory of his mother – and the promise of _forgiveness –_ to torment him.

“You,” Kylo snarled. He knew better than to try to strike at him now, but his hand still twitched towards the lightsaber holstered on his belt. “You did this.”

Skywalker shook his head. “You give me too much credit. That was all Rey.”

There was no hint of pride or triumph in his eyes. He didn’t look like a man who had emerged victorious against an enemy; instead, he wore an expression that Kylo was intimately familiar with: that of a long-suffering teacher, disappointed in his student.

It was beyond infuriating. Kylo scrambled to his feet. “Then you must have taught her, you showed her how to—”

“No,” Skywalker interrupted. “ _You_ taught her, Ben. Just like she’s been teaching you.”

He wanted to argue, to scream, to lash out with his weapon. But before he could do any of those things, his uncle disappeared, leaving Kylo alone with his rage.

 

***

 

Word of what happened in the starboard training chamber spread rapidly in the form of whispered conversations and hastily-deleted datapad messages.

The task of repairing and cleaning up the chamber fell mostly to the Finalizer’s maintenance droids, but the one human technician who caught a glimpse of the wreckage described it as the site of a large, eerily contained explosion. The next day, the technician disappeared from the ship, all of his possessions gone and his bunk made up in tight, military corners. No one dared discuss the incident after that.

The few officers who had previously been brave enough to look the Supreme Leader in the eye now dropped their gaze to the floor if he so much as glanced in their direction. With the majority of the crew terrified of him, Kylo Ren ironically spent more time on the ship than ever, no longer disappearing down onto far-flung planets for days at a time. Much to the trepidation of his generals, he also began attending military briefings more regularly, flanked on either side by his Knights, asking pointed questions about suspected Resistance troop movements and recruiting efforts. It was at one such briefing that Kylo Ren produced a small data stick from his cloak and fed it to the conference’s rooms holoprojector. The data stick contained a single piece of grainy footage: one that showed a young, human woman glancing around her as though she knew she was being followed, then pulling a hood over her face and disappearing into a crowd.

After several loops of the holo, Kylo Ren switched the projector off. “This is the girl responsible for the death of our former Supreme Leader,” he said tonelessly, not making eye contact with any of the generals. “All of our forthcoming efforts towards thwarting the Resistance will focus on capturing her – alive. The galaxy must see her answer for what she’s done.”

The room went silent for a moment. Privately, most of the generals considered this tactic strategically unsound, but their fear of Ren prevented them voicing any contrary opinions. Only General Hux, whose pixelated sneer was evident in his holo, spoke up, barely masking the contempt in his voice. “Supreme Leader, surely the capture of a single resistance fighter is of lower priority than—”

Kylo Ren flicked his index finger, and Hux’s holoprojecter shut off without warning. All the officers in the room sat up a little straighter in their chairs.

“Any other concerns?” asked Ren, his tone deceptively mild.

Of course there were none.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who waited two whole months for this. :)


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It might have taken me another few months, but I finally came up with what I hope is a more satisfying ending. Comments, kudos, and bookmarks are appreciated, as always. :)

 

Rey caught him in front of the mirror.

Kylo was fastening the clasp on his cloak, about to leave his quarters for the first-cycle briefing, when the constant, remote pressure in the back of his mind suddenly intensified. Before he could react, Rey’s reflection appeared behind him.

He whirled around. His first thought was that it had to be some sort of trick or illusion — perhaps another one of Skywalker’s. But Rey’s presence in the Force was unmistakable, and now it filled his mind like the melody of a familiar song.

He looked her up and down, still hardly daring to believe she was really there. Apart from the dust-stained, hooded cowl she wore, she was dressed much the same as the last time he saw her in person. On her face was a mix of trepidation and steely resolve.

“Call off the kidnappers,” she said without preamble.

Kylo resisted the urge to approach her. Something about her stance and the way she was looking at him suggested she wouldn’t appreciate it. Instead he stated the obvious. “You reopened the bond.”

Rey frowned and folded her arms. “You can’t reopen something that never closed.”

His resolve failing, Kylo took a step toward her. “But you stopped shutting me out.”

“Only so I could tell you to call off the kidnappers.” She yanked down the collar of her cowl to reveal the narrow bacta bandage across her throat. “That’s the second time some idiot bounty hunter has pulled a vibroblade on me this week. It’s getting tedious.”

Kylo’s mind abruptly clouded with rage. The idea of someone hurting her — maybe even scarring her — ostensibly under _his_ orders was unbearable. He made a mental note to have one of the Knights track down the bounty hunter who did this. “I told them not to harm you.”

“You told them not to kill me. They don’t seem to care what state I’m in when they deliver me to you.”

Kylo inwardly cursed himself. He should have been more specific. Of course he couldn’t trust the galaxy’s criminals and lowlifes not to misinterpret his decree. “I’ll amend my orders, then.”

“And what? Tell them to kidnap me more gently next time?”

“Would you prefer it if I focused our efforts on your traitorous friends instead?” he snapped. “I can give the order right now, if you want.” His hand hovered over the intercom panel on his desk.

“No!” Rey raised her voice almost to the point of shouting and then abruptly froze, looking panicked.

Kylo raised an eyebrow. “What’s the matter? Worried they’ll hear you talking to yourself?”

“They aren’t anywhere near me right now,” Rey hissed. “I had to leave to keep them safe. They have no idea where I am.”

“Good,” Kylo said firmly. Perhaps away from their influence, Rey would stop clinging so stubbornly to old and discredited ideals. Maybe she would even open her mind to him, the way she had when they touched hands. After all, she was already here, reaching out to him again for the first time in almost a year.

Something inside Rey seemed to break. “Why won’t you leave me alone?” she burst out. “I can’t go anywhere without some washed-up thug tailing me. I had to abandon the only friends I’ve ever had. I can’t even _sleep_ in peace anymore!”

Kylo tensed at the mention of sleep. He hadn’t expected her to acknowledge what transpired between them in dreams. “You weren’t letting me in,” he said, surprised at the rawness of his own honesty. “I had to see you. After everything that happened, Rey—”

“But I didn’t want to see you!” Rey interrupted. “Why do you think I shut you out? Why do you think I guarded my mind against you?”

“You didn’t seem to mind having me in your dreams,” Kylo shot back.

Rey’s posture stiffened, and her gaze dropped to the floor. “I didn’t realize it was really you until I woke up. I thought it was just another—just another dream. 

Kylo suddenly felt lightheaded. Was she admitting what he thought she was admitting? “Do you have dreams like that often?” He tried to sound triumphant, almost mocking, but his voice came out low and earnest.

Rey’s eyes met his. She looked utterly miserable. “I didn’t ask for this. Snoke did this to me. He put you in my mind, and now I can’t get you out.”

Kylo shook his head. She couldn’t be more wrong. After everything that had happened, how could she not realize that whatever existed between them went far beyond the powers of his old master?

He crossed the room until he was as close to Rey as he dared to get. He half-expected her to flinch or edge away, but she held her ground. She wasn’t afraid of him, and he didn’t want her to be.

“Rey,” he said softly. “This isn’t Snoke. The Force brought us together, and Snoke took credit because he thought he could use the connection to defeat us. But it only made us stronger.” Before she could protest, he took her bare hand in his gloved one. “ _This_ makes us stronger.”

Rey wrenched her hand away like he had electrocuted her. “There is no ‘us,’ Ben. You made your choice. You tried to kill my friends. Luke is _dead_ because of you!”

Hearing Skywalker’s name from her lips prompted a shudder that he hoped she wouldn’t notice. He couldn’t help but imagine his uncle, translucent and swathed in blue light, guiding Rey through lightsaber forms, teaching her how to meditate, showing her how to harness the raw strength she had only recently discovered existed within her. Skywalker was playing the role that was Kylo’s by right, undoubtedly filling Rey’s head with Jedi poison all the while. “Death doesn’t seem to be much of an impediment for my uncle,” he muttered, unable to keep the bitterness from his voice.

Rey glared at him, eyes shining. With her feelings closed off to him, he couldn’t tell if the unshed tears represented sadness, anger, or some mixture of the two. “What is that supposed to mean?” she demanded.

The question surprised Kylo, and for a moment, he wondered if Rey was deliberately playing dumb in order to irritate him or knock him off balance somehow. “It means that Skywalker keeps showing up to bother me, despite his being dead. Or has he not told you about that?”

Rey paused for a moment, frowning. But then she shook her head, vehement. “That’s impossible. You’re lying.”

“I’m not.” Kylo briefly considered opening his mind to her, showing her that he was telling the truth. But he didn’t know how he could do it without making skin-on-skin contact, and Rey had already made it clear she wasn’t amenable to that.

“I don’t believe you.”

Kylo sighed. “There is no death; there is the Force,” he recited in the most pedantic tone he could muster. “That’s the Jedi code. Surely he taught you _that_ much.”

One of the tears that had been threatening to spill from Rey’s eyes finally rolled down her cheek. “Do you mean you can — you can see him? He appears to you?” He voice broke. “Talks to you?”

Kylo scrutinized her. Either Rey was a very good actress, or he had misjudged his uncle once again. “Only twice. The last time was months ago.”

She collapsed onto what must have been a chair or a crate on her end, but to Kylo it looked like she was sitting on empty air. “I don’t understand,” she said softly, as though she were talking to herself. “Why would he appear to you and not me? I need him. The Resistance needs him. Whatever state he’s in — he must see that. He must know it.”

Kylo crouched down so that their faces were level, fighting a desperate impulse to wipe the tear from her cheek. “You don’t need him, Rey. You never did.”

“But I do. I don’t know how to become what the galaxy needs me to be. I don’t know how to be the last Jedi.”

“Then don’t be."

Rey made eye contact, glaring again. “What does he say to you when he appears? Does he tell you that he _forgives_ you?” There was a deliberate cruelty to her voice that Kylo had never heard there before. “Does he tell you that you can still come back to the Light?”

Kylo drew back and got to his feet. “No, actually,” he replied. There was no point in lying to her. “He told me to stay out of your dreams. He said you would turn the tables on me. And then he threw it in my face when I didn’t listen.”

The tiniest flicker of pride crossed Rey’s features. “Why didn’t you listen?”

“Because I had to see you again, and that was the only way you’d let me,” said Kylo, feeling increasingly like he was laying his soul bare to her. But then again, he supposed he had already done that on the day he asked her to join him.

A heavy silence fell between them. Rey broke it. “It’s not the only way,” she said quietly.

Kylo shook his head, pressing his fingers to his temples. They were talking in circles again. It was always the same conversation, the same argument, the same fundamental disagreement. “I can’t go back, Rey. You know that. I’ve chosen my path. I’ve chosen to move forward.”

A conflicted expression crossed Rey’s features, like she was having a heated debate with herself. Then she stood. Kylo could only watch, stock-still, as she crossed the room, unceremoniously yanked the glove off his right hand, and twined their fingers together.

There was no vision this time: no image of the two of them fighting side by side. Instead, Kylo felt an overwhelming sense of rightness, like he had finally returned home after a long and arduous journey. Threaded in with that sensation was a steadily-mounting desire to get even closer to her, to remove his left glove and every other scrap of fabric that separated them. He didn’t have to wonder if Rey felt the same way; the sudden flush in her cheeks and brightness in her eyes told him everything he needed to know.

“Ben,” Rey began.

Kylo didn’t let her finish the thought. He scooped her up off the ground — it felt like she weighed nothing at all — meaning to bring their mouths together, but Rey turned her head away at the last second. So Kylo settled for pressing his lips to her neck, savoring the way she smelled, the way she tasted. Hells, this was even better than the dream.

“Ben,” Rey said again, arching into his touch. “Come back.”

“Why should I?” he murmured. “You’re already here.”

And he intended to keep her that way. It was so much simpler like this: all touching, no talking. He undid the clasp on her cowl, letting it fall to the floor, baring her tanned shoulders. He kissed the freckles there, and his hands found their way underneath her tunic, underneath the wrappings she used to bind her breasts.

Rey shifted in his arms without warning, and for a horrible moment, Kylo thought she was pulling away. But she only turned, staying close but leaving her back to him. Maybe she didn’t want to see his face while they did this. Or maybe she didn’t want him to see hers. It didn’t matter either way, because Rey was taking his hand and guiding it down, past her navel and between her legs, where the cloth of her trousers was already faintly damp. Then she was rutting against the heel of his hand in a way that Kylo should have found disturbingly animalistic. Instead, it might have been the most entrancing thing he had ever seen.

“Can you…?” he said, his voice coming out low and strangled. “Like this?”

“Yes,” Rey gasped. “Almost. But I want you there with me, Ben. I want to know what it feels like.”

Kylo meant to reply that he had been close since she started writhing against him, but her confession seemed to have robbed him of his powers of speech. It wasn’t long before she shuddered and went rigid in his arms, and hells, Kylo could _feel it_ when she came, dragging him along over the edge with her.

They stayed like that for a few moments: pressed together, catching their breath. But reality came creeping back sooner than Kylo would have liked, and Rey pulled away from him, taking the warmth of their connection with her. He looked on numbly as she adjusted her tunic and retrieved her cowl from the floor, her expression carefully blank apart from a subtle tension around her jaw.

He wondered if she was ashamed of what they just did, if she hadn’t meant to surrender so quickly and easily to the urges they provoked in each other. Or perhaps she considered this a betrayal of her friends, of her cause. For his part, Kylo felt none of the usual shame that accompanied his orgasms, even with his release sticky and rapidly cooling inside his trouser leg.

Having fixed her clothing and smoothed down her mussed hair, Rey turned to him. He noticed that the flush still lingered in her cheeks, and her lips were bitten red. The sight would have been arousing if he hadn’t just climaxed; instead, it filled Kylo with a strange, tender ache.

When she looked up at him, though, Rey’s eyes were sad and resigned. “You’re right. There’s something between us — something that Snoke didn’t put there. But whatever it is, it’s not enough to bring you back.”

Kylo felt as though a large weight had settled over him. “No,” he said mechanically. He doubted he could lie to her now, even if he wanted to. “It’s not.”

“Then there’s nothing left me for me to say.”

“Rey, wait,” said Kylo, fearing that she would close herself off to him again, that she would vanish from the room. He spoke in a rush without pausing to think. “I don’t have to go back. And you don’t have to join me. The Force doesn’t care about our loyalties; we’re bound to each other no matter which side we’re on. Why keep fighting this when we don’t have to?"

Some of the misery faded from Rey’s expression, but her eyes narrowed. “What are you saying?”

Kylo struggled to find the right words. “I’m saying that there’s no reason we can’t see each other like this — be together like this — again.”

Rey stared at him, incredulous. “You can’t be serious. You expect me to keep seeing you — to keep doing _that —_ while you’re actively trying to kill my friends?”

“The Order can refocus its efforts.” Hux and the other Generals wouldn’t like that, but Kylo couldn’t bring himself to care right now.

“That sounds an awful lot like blackmail.”

That hadn’t been Kylo’s intent, but he saw her point. “It’s not. Consider it a show of good faith.”

Rey regarded him for a long moment. She must have noticed the desperate sincerity in the way he spoke, the way he looked at her, because her resolve seemed to falter. He could tell she was at war with herself, her principles squaring off against her desires. If their positions were reversed, Kylo knew which side would win.

“There are some ground rules,” she said abruptly.

That caught him off-guard. “Ground rules?”

“Ground rules for when —  _if_ we do this again.”

_When we do this again._ Kylo hardly dared to hope.

“Number one,” she said. “Call off the bounty hunters.”

“Done,” he replied without hesitation.

“Number two: if Luke... _appears_ to you again, tell him I need to speak with him.”

Kylo grimaced, recalling his last encounter with his uncle. “The next time Skywalker appears to me, I’m telling him to fuck off.”

“Not if you want to see me again.”

The idea of Rey speeding around in his father’s old ship, chatting with Skywalker’s Force ghost was beyond irritating, but at the moment, the threat of her absence outweighed everything else in his mind. “Fine.”

“And number three: stay out of my dreams.”

Kylo gave her a rare, wry smile. “That should be easy, now that you’re here.”

 


End file.
